9:12 p.m.
I'm pleased to announce that JBoss DNA 0.7 is now available. The JBoss DNA site has
been updated with all the latest information, and the artifacts have been loaded into the
JBoss Maven repository [2]. And don't forget to check out our improved Reference
Guide, the updated JavaDocs, and, if you're just getting familiar with JBoss DNA, our
updated Getting Started guide.
This release is chocked full of some pretty fantastic features. So much so that I had a
hard time keeping this email as short as it is!
The short summary is this: JBoss DNA now implements all of the JCR Level 1 features,
almost all Level 2 features (everything except referential integrity), and the optional
locking and observation features. This version passes more than 97% of the JCR TCK tests
that cover Level 1, Level 2, locking and observation. (All of the failures are because of
referential integrity and a handful of known issues.) Fortunately, most of these are
either less-frequently-used features of JCR or issues that can be worked around.
So, on to the features...
The first of the new features is JCR observation, which makes it possible to receive
notifications of changes being made to the repository. We plan to heavily rely upon this
feature when we add support for clustering.
Another major feature is support for searching a JCR repository using one of three query
languages. One of these languages is XPath, as mandated by the JCR 1.0 API. Another
language supported by JBoss DNA is JCR-SQL2, which is actually defined by the JCR 2.0
specification as a replacement for the (optional) JCR-SQL language define in JCR 1.0. And
the third query language is actually a simple full-text search language that accepts a
series of terms and phrases, similar to web search engines. And JBoss DNA is poised to
offer other languages as well, since our query engine parses all of these languages into
into a single abstract query model upon which the query planning, validation,
optimization, and processing is performed. For details, see our query documentation [3].
This release also introduces a number of new and improved connectors that really show the
value of JBoss DNA and federating repositories. Both the file system connector and SVN
connector were reworked to improve performance and to support updates, and they both offer
a preview of an optional caching system. The JPA storage connector was dramatically
improved and is now significantly faster, more capable, and more efficient. There is also
a new JDBC metadata connector that provides read-only access to the schema information of
relational databases through JDBC. The federated connector was also improved, and is now
used in several key places within our JCR implementation. Plus, we still have connectors
to Infinispan, JBoss Cache, and a simple transient in-memory store.
There are also a number of new and improved sequencers. A new text sequencer is able to
extract structured data from comma-separated or fixed-width text files. A new DDL
sequencer is capable of parsing a number of DDL dialects to extract the more important DDL
statements. The CND sequencer was rewritten to be much simpler, perform better, fix a
number of known issues, and eliminate third-party dependencies. There is also a new Java
class file sequencer that operates on Java class files and produces output that is
comparable to the Java source file sequencer, and that can be used in conjunction with the
ZIP file sequencer to extract the Java metadata from JARs, WARs, and EAR files. And
don't forget the XML sequencer or our other sequencers for extracting metadata from
images, MP3s, and Microsoft Office documents.
We've fixed quite a few bugs, added numerous improvements, and upgraded all
third-party dependencies to the latest versions available at this time. (See the release
notes for details.) The build system now supports running all of the tests against a
variety of databases, making it very easy to test against DBMSes that JBoss DNA
doesn't directly test against. And we've added a new DDL generation utility that
produces the DDL for the database schema created and used by the JPA connector. To top it
all off, JCR repositories now support the use of anonymous users, though this can easily
be changed for production purposes.
Thanks to the whole JBoss DNA community for all their hard work! The JBoss DNA
contributors and users are simply fantastic, and this release was only possible because of
all your efforts!
Take a look at the release and the expanded and improved Getting Started [5] and Reference
Guides. Let us know what you think!
Best regards,
Randall